Platform Monologues Part 5

--he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first experienced some measure of it himself.

But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circ.u.mstance. Is he without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would appear so--

No creed for me! I am a man apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;

A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every pa.s.sion, and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.

I am a man set to overhear The inner harmony, the very tune Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare For all the pageantry of Time: to catch The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour And make them known.

Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"--

A fearless, ruthless, wanton band, Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe Of last year's log a smouldering brand, To light at Yule the fire of faith.

He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined to envy the old days

When Heaven and h.e.l.l were nigh.

It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says Ninian:--

Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talk As though I were persuaded of the truth Of some received or unreceived belief; But always afterwards I am ashamed At such lewd lapses into bigotry.

And though another immediately e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es

Intolerantly tolerant!

we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an att.i.tude of mind not wholly unlike his own.

His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes--

They may doom till the moon forsakes Her dark, star-daisied lawn; They may doom till Doomsday breaks With angels to trumpet the dawn; While love enchants the young And the old have sorrow and care, No song shall be unsung, Unprayed no prayer.

Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the midst of it; but what of his destiny?

For the fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen.

We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, and live, and die At the waft of an unseen hand.

And again--

I am not thinking solely of myself, But of the groaning cataract of life, The ruddy stream that leaps importunate Out of the night, and in a moment vaults The immediate treacherous precipice of time, Splashing the stars, downward into the night.

And apart from destiny, which is beyond human control, society is much at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of--

... Slaves in Pagan Rome-- In Christian England--who begin to test The purpose of their state, to strike for rest And time to feel alive in.

And--

Hoa.r.s.ely they beg of Fate to give A little lightening of their woe, A little time to love, to live, A little time to think and know.

There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:--

... My heart!

Who wore it out with sensual drudgery Before it came to me? What warped its valves?

It has been used; my heart is secondhand.

This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind, should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr.

Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares to be a requisite of all that is cla.s.sic. He is not always deep; he is not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--

On Eden's daisies couched, they felt They carried Eden in their heart,

is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--

For no man ever understood a woman, No woman ever understood a man, And no man ever understood a man: No woman ever understood a woman, And no man ever understood himself; No woman ever understood herself.

We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest, have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with trembling--even Shakespeare.

Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the form which is his style.

And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity.

"Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle.

Davidson has learned his lesson well from Sh.e.l.ley and Wordsworth and Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his personae--

I love not brilliance; give me words Of meadow-growth and garden plot, Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds, Gay flowers and jewels like me not.

It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can become in the hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr.

Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the _Elegy_ can supply no more instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in--

The patchwork sunshine _nets_ the lea, The flitting shadows _halt and pa.s.s_ Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee _Lounges_ along the flowerless gra.s.s,

and in "I heard the _husky_ whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to think that, like many another finished artist, he has pa.s.sed through stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that pa.s.sages of his _Fleet-street Eclogues_ were written independently at different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form.

However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound,"

which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had pa.s.sed under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope.

Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century lines as--

And br.i.m.m.i.n.g echoes spill the pleasant din,

or--

The sloping sh.o.r.es that fringe the velvet tides;

and (speaking of steamers)--

Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbs And brows precipitous the pliant sea.

How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of the birds